A Populist Make-OverMeet John Edwards, the Corporate Man
by Doug Ireland

www.dissidentvoice.org
January 29, 2004First Published in the
LA Weekly

John
Edwards has the best smile, the best hair and the most effective populist
discourse of all the Democrats who want to be president. His endlessly
repeated “Two Americas” stump speech — flaying the haves for fleecing the
have-nots — has been carefully honed over months on the campaign trail. It
won him second place in Iowa. But it takes more than one speech to give a
contender real staying power — as the cash-strapped Edwards discovered when,
by an eyelash, he lost the third-place ticket out of New Hampshire to a
treasury-rich general with a weightier résumé.

But what’s under the hair
and behind the smile? He was born Johnny Reid Edwards in a small mill town,
but abandoned this moniker as too Snopes-y when he began the legal career
that made him super-rich. He constantly says he’s the “son of a mill
worker,” and to hear him tell it, he pulled himself up from poverty so
crushing it evokes images of shoeless Li’l Abner. His “Two Americas”
rally-pleaser gets much of its power from this poor-boy autobiography, but
in making this tale his central campaign theme, Edwards gave his family
history a cosmetic make-over, like the one he gave his name.

“The Edwardses were solidly
middle class” when Johnny was growing up, according to a four-part profile
of the North Carolina senator in his home state’s most prestigious daily,
the Raleigh News and Observer. It’s true that for a few years as a
young man Edwards’ father worked on the floor of a Roger Milliken textile
mill. But Edwards père (a lifelong Republican, like his reactionary boss)
quickly climbed upward, becoming a monitor of worker productivity as a
“time-study” man — which any labor organizer in the South will tell you is a
polite term for a stoolie who spies on the proletarian mill hands to get
them to speed up production for the same low wages. Daddy Edwards’ grassing
got him promoted to supervisor, then to plant manager — and he finally
resigned to start his own business as a consultant to the textile industry.
As a Boston Globe profile of Edwards put it last year, the senator
never “notes that his father was part of management . . . ‘John was more
middle class than most of us,’” says Bill Garner, a high school friend and
college roommate.

Edwards’ legislative record
— what little there is of it — is hardly populist. In fact, Edwards is a
classic, corporate-friendly, centrist New Democrat. In his five years as a
freshman senator, Edwards on his own produced little legislation, much less
than some other first-termers — although he was assigned by Tom Daschle to
represent the Democrats in negotiations over a patients’ bill of rights, and
so can boast he was a co-sponsor of the final, but aborted, bill.

However, there’s one highly
significant chapter in his Senate career omitted from Edwards’ campaign Web
site. Edwards, who comes from a state where banking is big business, played
a critical role in brokering legislation to allow banks to sell mutual funds
and insurance, and to engage in other speculative ventures. This law, worth
hundreds of billions to the banks, blasted a gigantic hole in the Glass-Steagal
banking law’s firewall of protections designed to prevent the kinds of bank
collapses that marked the Great Depression of the ’30s — meaning that it put
the money of Joe Six-Pack depositors at risk. Such a gigantic boon to the
banking lobby can hardly be classed as a populist victory.

If there was real depth to
Edwards’ rhetorical populism, one would expect to find it in “Real Solutions
for America.” That’s the 60-page campaign booklet that Edwards refers to in
his stump speech. But when one checks out these “real solutions” (available
on his Web site), one finds a lot of nice-sounding hot air, some innocuous
small-bore proposals — and few specific details. On a number of important
matters — example: federal corporate welfare — the “solutions” Edwards’
speeches describe as “bold” involve . . . appointing a commission.

Sometimes, the pamphlet
contradicts Edwards’ reality. Example: “Some tax lawyers make millions
through flimsy letters telling clients how to shelter their income. Edwards
will stop these abuses,” it claims. But in 1995, Edwards — already a
multimillionaire — set up a professional corporation to shelter at least $10
million in legal earnings from having to pay Medicare taxes on them, saving
himself some $290,000, according to the News and Observer, which
quoted a top specialist from the American Institute of CPAs as labeling this
trick “gaming the system.” Populist hypocrisy?

The
foreign and defense policy sections of the pamphlet are similarly airy and
detail-free, with lots of boilerplate guff about “promoting democratic
values.” And while Edwards, when campaigning, bashes John Ashcroft for
assaults on civil liberties, his pamphlet boasts that he’d “create thousands
of neighborhood watch groups by 2007,” which sounds suspiciously akin to
Ashcroft’s infamous TIPS program of setting citizen to spy on citizen.
Edwards, of course, voted for both the blank check to Dubya for war in Iraq,
and for the civil liberties–shredding Patriot Act. He’s in no position to
take on Dubya over his lies about Iraq’s WMD — for Edwards himself
proclaimed, as late as October 10, 2002, “We know that Hussein has chemical
and biological weapons”; and hailed the invasion of Iraq, which “still might
prove a victory for people everywhere . . . who seek to halt the spread of
weapons of mass destruction.”

The Web zine Slate
called him “more hawkish than all the Democratic candidates except for Joe
Lieberman.” Example: As a senator, Edwards voted to deploy the “Star Wars”
national missile defense as soon as possible — but you won’t find this
controversial position in Johnny’s feel-good pamphlet. His solution to the
quagmire of the U.S. occupation of Iraq is not to hand it over to the United
Nations — of which Edwards has been a tart critic — but to have Iraq policed
by NATO, which is not exactly what most of the world would interpret as a
step toward the international rule of law.

Edwards is certainly
clever, but his knowledge base is awfully thin — only Al Sharpton’s is
thinner. In the last New Hampshire debate, he didn’t know what the Defense
of Marriage Act really said — despite the fact that the GOP is making gay
marriage the hot-button social issue in ’04. He’s startlingly callow to go
up against Dubya, no matter how good a debater he is. Example: In the June
2003 Washington Monthly, its iconoclastic editor, Charlie Peters,
reported the following anecdote: “One evening while he was campaigning for
the Senate in North Carolina, Edwards was faced with a choice of several
events he might attend. An advance man suggested, ‘Maybe we ought to go to
the reception for Leah Rabin.’ ‘Who’s she?’ ‘Yitzhak Rabin’s widow,’ replied
the aide. ‘Who was he?’ asked Edwards.”

Edwards on the stump likes
to proclaim, “What you see is what you get.” Not quite, Johnny.

Doug Ireland is a New York-based media critic and commentator
whose articles appear regularly in The Nation, Tom Paine.com, and In These
Times among many others. This article first appeared in the
LA Weekly.